Agamben and Heidegger

Monday, July 30, 2012 — Adam Kotsko

Spending time with Heidegger at the same time that I’m translating Agamben is proving fertile — it’s obvious that Agamben is “influenced by” Heidegger in a lot of ways, but it’s good to get a firm handle on exactly how. It’s now beginning to seem to me that the ambition of the Homo Sacer series is to rework Heidegger’s “history of Being,” in part by treating Nazism as a decisive event in that history in a way that Heidegger’s direct involvement could not allow him to.

I also have to admit that I feel a little dumb for not realizing that the emphasis on Aristotle most likely comes from Heidegger and that the priority of potentiality over actuality is found directly and directly in Being and Time: “As a modal category of presence-at-hand, possibility signifies what is not yet actual and what is not at any time necessary. It characterizes the merely possible. Ontologically it is on a lower level than actuality and necessity. On the other hand, possibility as an existentiale [i.e., the equivalent of a “category” for Dasein’s special way of being] is the most primordial and ultimate positive way in which Dasein is characterized ontologically” (M&R trans., pg. 183, original pp. 143-44).

(I thought I saw a book with the title “Agamben and Heidegger” in some context recently, but I can’t find it on Amazon now.)

I wrote about this on my blog as well and I believe I titled it Agamben and Heidegger. I think the idea of facticity plays prominent in Agamben from Heidegger. Adam do you feel that Agamben didn’t do a thorough study of Aristotle using primary sources but instead used perhaps Heidegger’s work on Aristotle? If this is the case how did you come to this? thanks

I don’t think he’s covering up anything. If you want to rip off someone’s ideas and hope no one notices, do you really choose Heidegger? Unless I’m misunderstanding the claim you’re attributing to Critchley.

Well, there is also Heidegger’s 1931 course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics θ 1-3. On the Essence and Actuality of Force, which seems a very clear source for Agamben’s take on actuality/potentiality…
Agamben’s explicit closeness to—and assumed heritage from—Heidegger sometimes limits his approach; for instance, in The Open: Man and Animal he kind of entangles himself in Heidegger’s brilliantly tortuous argument, reaching a somewhat unsatisfactory dead-end.
At other times, his criticism is clearer, as in The Kingdom and the Glory (and in the direction pointed by Adam): «Heidegger cannot resolve the problem of technology because he was unable to restore it to its political locus. The economy of being, its epochal unveiling in a veiling is, like economic theology, a political mystery that corresponds to powers entering into the figure of Government. And the operation that resolves this mystery, which deactivates and renders inoperative the technological-ontological apparatus, is political.» (253)
Anyway, I gather his misreading of Foucault to be more fruitful than his entire heideggerian—a bit pompous—heritage…